Black Hawk Down

[Ignacio Aguilar]

The other day I was watching this film and I was wondering what film stocks and processings they did to achieve that image texture and film grain.

 

Perhaps some ENR enhancing the blacks & contrast and increasing the grain?

 

Slawomir Idziak (why he doesn't work more often?) did an amazing job with his grads here. This film looks terrific, specially the night stuff.

[David Mullen ASC]

The June 2002 AC article (lumped in a summary article of ASC/Oscar nominees) only mentioned that EXR 50D (5245) and Vision 250D (5246) were used for day exteriors, but sometimes EXR 100T (5248) and Vision 500T (5279) were used instead (I suspect for any cooler effect, like for dusk scenes.) 5279 was used for night exteriors and 5277 was used for night interiors.

 

In other words, what stocks WEREN'T used... if I were the one heading to Morocco to make a movie with multiple camera units, I'd probably keep the number of stocks down just to simplify things. But I guess Europe is not THAT far away.

 

I've always suspected something was used to increase contrast, either ENR for the prints I saw, or Vision Premier, but nothing has ever been mentioned to that effect in any articles I've read. But the prints WERE fairly contrasty with deep blacks.

 

This was a Super-35 film but I believe they did a traditional optical blow-up to anamorphic, not a digital intermediate.

[Ignacio Aguilar]

Once again, thanks for the info, David :)

 

I believe that it was an optical blow-up, and a very good one. The print I saw theatrically at the time of release was excellent, with very deep blacks, excellent sharpness and vibrant colors. I still think this is one of those films that justifies the use of the Super 35 format over anamorphic. They really took advantage of the spherical lenses in every way.

 

Does the article mention any push-developing? None of that stocks are as grainy as some of the shots on the film when normally developed... (take a look at the opening scene, it looks like something shot on 16mm).